Your phone isn’t ringing with consultation requests. There’s no waiting list. And too many of the inquiries you do get are tire-kickers who haggle over price and book with whoever quotes lowest.
That’s not bad luck and it’s not your market. In 20+ years of marketing cosmetic practices, the same handful of mistakes keeps showing up behind a silent phone. Four of them do the most damage. Fix a few and a 6-figure practice becomes a 7-figure practice. I’ve watched it happen. One client raised his fees enough to pay for our entire engagement without booking a single extra surgery. Another built an 8-month waiting list where patients pay $1,000 just to jump the line.
Here are the four mistakes, in the order they do the most damage.
Key Takeaways
- Price shopping is a symptom, not the disease. When patients can't see a difference between you and the injector down the street, price is the only thing left to compare.
- Copying the leading practice in your market guarantees you stay behind it.
- No single tactic (SEO, ads, social media) can fix a practice with no positioning and no conversion system underneath it.
- Marketing that starts and stops never runs long enough to work, and then gets blamed for not working.
Mistake 1: Competing on price because you have no position
A cosmetic patient makes her buying decision very carefully. She weighs many factors, and price only becomes the deciding one when you’re viewed as a commodity.
A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. Strip away every visible aspect of quality and service, and what is she left with? Price. Price becomes the only factor on which she can make a decision. So the problem is not your price. The problem is that you’ve allowed the market to strip you of every quality on which she could plant her opinion and justify choosing you.
Neurotoxins are the perfect example. Everyone from dentists to nurses injects toxins now. The corporations that produce them don’t care if you go out of business, because the demand exists either way and their margin is fixed whether you charge $15 a unit or $5. With their volume rewards and discount programs, they can actually do better when sales spread across more injectors. Demand in the market stays the same no matter how many plastic surgeons and dermatologists get squeezed out.
Think about the car you drive. Was it the cheapest on the market? Then why isn’t every car on the road the cheapest one available? People don’t buy on price unless price is the only visible difference.
It’s your job to make sure you’re not a commodity, and to give your patient real justification to pay you more for surgery or injectables. Fixing this one mistake let one of my clients raise his fees enough to completely pay for our work without doing any additional surgeries. It helped another build that 8-month waiting list with the $1,000 line-jump fee.
That’s how you stop complaining about price shoppers and start charging what the work is worth. Be different in a way the patient values, and the haggling stops.
Mistake 2: Copying the competition
Do what everyone else is doing and you become like everyone else. At best, average.
Patients don’t want the also-ran. They want the leader. She wants to feel special and she wants to feel like she’s getting the best. When you copy, you’re neither. You’re following, and followers get put out of business by the next real change in the market.
The iPhone didn’t take over because it was another phone. It combined your phone, internet, music, and photos at a time when most phones could barely hold a clear call. It started from what the user wanted, before she even knew she wanted it, and wrapped that around a device she already understood. Killer product, marketed in a way that could be understood and desired.
You should never lose sight of your competition. But watching them is not the same as copying them. When they zig, zag. And zag strategically.
Mistake 3: Confusing tactics with marketing
This is by far the most common one I see doctors make. They come back from a conference sold on a single tactic: search engine optimization, print advertising, social media. They saw someone succeed with it, or a speaker was convincing, and now that one tactic is going to be the difference-maker for the practice.
I knew a doctor who decided consulting help cost too much and that he could do his own SEO. He carried around a copy of SEO For Dummies. Years later, he still didn’t rank.
Here’s the part that stings: even ranking #1 on Google won’t save you if your conversion pieces are broken. A prospect who finds you and sees nothing worth choosing just leaves. I go into the conversion pieces in detail in my book, A Cut Above, an Amazon #1 best seller in its category.
A tactic amplifies your marketing. If your positioning, your message, and your offer are broken, the tactic amplifies broken. Marketing your practice properly means having a plan and making sure everything you do drives that plan forward. I laid out the full system in my plastic surgery marketing guide. Jumping on the latest bandwagon isn’t a plan. It’s a lottery ticket.
Mistake 4: Start-stop marketing
I can diagnose this one without ever speaking to a practice. The website and social accounts tell the whole story.
You start a blog because someone told you it’s how you rank and reach your audience. Two months in, the site doesn’t rank better and nobody’s reading, so you stop. Then a speaker at an annual meeting convinces you that practices not on social media are losing out. Your staff opens a Facebook page and fills it with practice news, as if patients give a rat’s ass about your office activities. Engagement flatlines. The page gets demoted to a once-a-week afterthought that exists so you can tell yourself the base is covered.
The conclusion you reach: none of this works. The conclusion you should reach: you were told what to do but never how, and you quit before anything could compound.
Keep thinking the first way and you’ll keep getting one or two consultation requests a week, while practices running a real system take one or two every single day.
What fixing these mistakes looks like
When a midtown Toronto surgeon we worked with fixed his positioning and his conversion system, the numbers moved fast. During a recession.
None of that came from a new tactic. It came from removing the four mistakes above and building a system that turns attention into booked consultations.
These are the first four mistakes. Part 2 covers what’s really keeping practices stuck below 7 figures.
If you want to know which of these four mistakes is costing your practice the most, that’s the first thing we diagnose in a plastic surgery marketing engagement. Bring your numbers. We’ll tell you the truth about them, whether you hire us or not.